Christian Ward is a UK-based writer who has recently appeared in The Dewdrop, Dodging the Rain, Blue Unicorn, The Seventh Quarry, Bluepepper, Tipton Poetry Journal, The Amazine and Rye Whiskey Review. 

The Hunter

After Dave Pollot's painting "The Hunter" 


Now that he's retired from bounty 
hunting, Boba Fett likes to hunt
mallard ducks when the sun is low
and haunting like the call of a loon.
Crooked like a walking cane,
the birds' iridescent green heads
are copy and pasted from Duck Hunt,
aristocratic shoots, and laser tag.
Paused mid-flight like a stop motion
frame, the ducks wait for a play button
to unfreeze the scene. Both designed
for death, they know one must cancel
the other out; the bulrushes in the scene
taut like a bowstring as the tension 
prepares to launch itself like an arrow.

PET Scan

My body is a slasher movie
screaming through the screen.
I'm the cull of victims — the clichéd
jock, a cheerleader pretty like buttered
popcorn, the one hiding in the utility
room while the knife plays peek-a-boo —
the masked killer, the owl-faced cop.
Watch while everyone is knocked down
like characters in Guess Who?. Watch
while the cancer plays the worst game
of hide and seek with the lone survivor
braver than someone facing down 
hitmen of wolves, a lifetime of blizzards,
whatever's apocalypse of the day 
is on the menu. My body will outperform
the box office, while you'll weep 
at the returns my shadow offers, 
diminishing like the cuttings of a former life 
left squirming on the editing room floor.

Writing poetry is like being a Star Trek redshirt

Since every poem is an away mission leading
to certain death, set phasers to stun. Wrestle
with the avocado skinned metaphor. Haiku
your game of four dimensional chess 
with aliens sporting bulbous fishbowl heads.
Every experience is a holodeck script
for a journal. Don't worry about assimilation
by the rain or angry aliens carrying the weight
of mountain ranges on their foreheads. 
Remember, you're a bricklayer, a farmer, a doctor.